“Are you happy?”

Answering such a question can seem hard at first, because it involves questioning your own environment, your current situation, your current emotions and feelings, and yet, it is a question that is asked to the human population every single year.

Thanks to the Cantril Ladder, people are asked to scale their current happiness from 0 to 10, and their scores are then combined with other people from the same country, to obtain a national ‘Happiness Score’. It can then be used to compare the happiness of different countries, all the while adding other factors to the mix, to try to understand what could be the cause, or what could heavily influence the human happiness.

“Happiness is when your life fulfills your needs.” -HappinessInternational.org

It is believed that happiness would correspond to a certain amount of needs that a human being would have, which would mean that if they fulfill their needs, then they should be happy. However, what do people need to be happy? Is it money? Is it food? Is it safety?

The purpose of this small study is not to find a universal answer to happiness, nor to explain what specific behaviour is required to live a happy life, but to find out how people’s happiness can be influenced by or related to social factors, such as politics, economy, health or education.

“The greatest source of happiness is the ability to be grateful at all times.” -Zig Ziglar

The data used in this report mostly comes from the website Kaggle, such as “World Happiness Report”, “World Happiness Data”, “Human Happiness Indicators”, “Social Progress and Happiness” and “Happiness and Alcohol Consumption”. The last database called “Personal well being estimates by age and sex” comes from the Office for National Statistics – U.K..

While happiness is a worldwide shared concept, not every country is as happy as the others, sometimes even affecting whole areas: while Europe and Northern America seem like areas where people are fairly happy with their lives, others like South America, Africa and Asia tend to be less happy.

Based on the data from a study on the British population, it is possible to see that the quantity of people being fairly happy, happy or not so happy seem to remain constant through the years.

However, it seems that the general happiness score of a country still evolve each and every year, even though it seems to remain constant inside the country. The difference of scores between countries is also very visible from this graph.

Based again on the U.K. study, it can be seen that, while most people seem to be farely happy with a score of around 7 points over 10, it seems that girls slightly seem to be happier than boys.

It can also be seen that people from different age groups’ happiness is also higher or lower based on which age group people belong to. In fact, people that are between 30 and 40, who are probably working, are slightly less happy than younger or older people. Is work related to happiness?

With this graph, it can be seen that there seems to be a link between GDP per capita and Happiness. Countries that have a higher GDP per capita are often showing a higher happiness score. The country’s production looks like it has a strong influence on the happiness of the inhabitants of those countries.

The working situation of the British people also seem to be highly related to their own happiness. Indeed, it is possible to see that the “unemployed” category countains more ‘not too happy’ and less ‘very happy’ people than others. The categories containing the most ‘very happy’ are the “retired” and “keeping house” categories, which can lead us to think that work impacts negatively people’s happiness when they are looking for jobs, but people who are done working or who don’t but are not looking for actual jobs are the happiest. Not having to work seems to affect very differently people’s lives. If we look more closely on people who work, the happiest are the one who are working fulltime, more than the ones working only parttime. We can wonder if that is related to income.

Income also seems to have a certain influence on the happiness of people, as the happiest seemingly are the ones earning the most money as the amount of “not too happy” is the smallest and the “very happy” is the biggest for the “$25 000 and more” category. This could also be questioned as the people earning less than $1 000 also have a huge amount of very happy people, even though their “not too happy” group is also big. But with such a high income also comes a certain sense of prestige, can it be that prestige is also related to happiness?

Prestige also seems to slightly influence happiness. People who have more prestige seem to be slightly happier.

GDP per capita, working situation, income and prestige all seem to influence happiness, even if it is just a little bit, but working seems very hard if health doesn’t follow. Is health related to happiness?

People living in a country with a higher healthy life expectancy seem to be happier. At first sight, it seems like health is important for happiness.

Based on these four point plots, we can see that there doesn’t seem to be a trend showing in the graphs. Therefore, it is hard to tell whether basic human needs, shelter, health and wellness or nutrition and basic medical care are actually related to happiness.

Health problems can also derive from the quality of the surrounding environment, so we can question if environment is also related to people’s happiness. From these graphs, we can also see that no trend seems to appear, therefore, neither environmental quality nor water and sanitation seem necessary for happiness.

But if basic needs are not even required for happiness… What is? It might be linked to how people were raised, what values they obtained through their education, and what they feel that they need to be happy.

Trends are also hard to grasp considering the effects of education on happiness.

Most of the countries have access to basic knowledge, but that doesn’t seem to affect their happiness score, as a lot of countries that have access to basic knowledge still have low happiness scores.

Countries where the access to advanced education is higher than 75% actually present a high happiness score but under 75%, it all seems to be fuzzy again.

Access to information and communications also doesn’t seem have an effect on happiness.

Information and communications can also fight against ignorance which could lead to more tolerance and inclusion. But as information and communications don’t seem to have an impact on happiness, it is the same for tolerance and inclusion.

Even though Advanced Education seems to have an influence on happiness, access to basic knowledge, information, communication, tolerance and inclusion don’t really seem to affect people’s happiness. It might be linked to who is deciding on what the education programs include, and what level of information and communications is allowed. Is happiness also linked to politics?

As weird as it could seem, personal rights also do not seem to not have an impact on happiness. However, most countries that have a happiness score higher than 6 mostly have more freedom to make life choices. Is freedom necessary for happiness but not rights?

Just like rights don’t affect happiness, social progress don’t seem to impact it either. However, it is not the case of social support, where a trend is showing: the more social support is provided, the happier the people are.

Freedom and Social support are two factors that actually seem to impact the happiness of people, where rights and social progress seem to not help. Some people actually believe that alcohol helps them cope with their problems, as in alcohol could provide them social support. What if alcohol was actually related to happiness?

Could alcohol actually impact happiness? This is probably a question that nobody asked, except alcohol-lovers, and the answer is actually pretty vague.

Consumption of beer does not seem to have any effect on happiness, nor does consumption of spirit.

However, it can be seen that countries that consume a lot of wine actually score higher than 5 on the Cantril Ladder. Why is that? It can probably be linked to the fact that countries that drink lots of wine per capita can actually afford it, and therefore have enough money to do so, which links it back to the fact that the concept of happiness seems to be heavily influenced by the concept of money.

From this small study, we have found that freedom to make life choices, social support, work, income, national production, prestige, advanced education and a long healthy life expectation are the social aspects that affects the most the human concept of happiness.